4. Decide what doesn’t matter, so you can invest your time and money into what does.

5. Think regularly about how you would live your life if social media didn’t exist, if you weren’t documenting your every move, or if you didn’t have glossy, edited pictures to compare yourself to.

6. Stop overreacting.

7. Have something to talk about that isn’t other people, and your judgments of them.

8. Stop worrying about inane things like whether or not you are “fat.” Nobody will be at your funeral blessing your life because you maintained one pant size. How you look is not an accomplishment.

9. Ask questions about other people more than you make statements about yourself.

10. Stop trying to have the most nuanced, complex opinions more than you try to be the kindest, most empathetic person you know.

11. Cut yourself some slack. One of the biggest regrets most people have about their 20s is that they didn’t enjoy them more. And I’m not talking about “buy more expensive dinners, take another trip to Thailand” type of enjoyment. I mean having the ability to take a deep breath and sip coffee in the morning knowing that you have done, and are doing, your best.

12. Read books.

13. Learn how to be nice. This is the most insanely powerful life hack, and yet the most overlooked. Learn how to genuinely be nice to people. This will get you farther than anything else.

14. Live so death has nothing to steal. Leave everything on the table. Don’t hold back your thoughts, your love, your creativity for another day. That path leads you to becoming a fraction of the person you were meant to be.

15. Stop saying you want to be in a forever relationship, and be in one. Your soulmate relationship is something you build, not something you stumble upon. If you don’t figure this out, you will be perpetually disappointed by the person you end up with.

16. Live within your means. If you don’t learn to do this when you have little, you won’t be able to do it when you have more. High-earning people can also be the most indebted and financially unstable, because they are always living just a bit outside of what they can afford.

17. Accomplishments don’t change your life, habits do.

18. Write a mission statement and use it as your guideline. Define your most essential values and make sure your thoughts, actions and decisions align with them. This is how you live an honest life.

19. Don’t burn bridges. Learn to bow out of friendships, relationships, jobs and parties with grace.

20. Ask for the truth.

21. Be in the discomfort that’s leading you to your bad habits. Whatever it is that’s holding you back in your life is actually a symptom of some unmet need. Figure out what it is, and feed it in a healthy way. Your external issues will start to dissolve as you do.

22. Recognize the ways in which you’ve projected blame onto others. “What you love in people is what you love about yourself; what you hate in people is what you can’t see in yourself.”

23. Learn to seek purpose more than you do pleasure. Pleasure does not change your life, it makes discomfort bearable. Purpose makes discomfort worth it. Don’t let comfort be your first virtue.

24. Home is where you make it, so make it somewhere.

25. Break free from the illusion that what you see on Instagram is “real life.” It is not “real life.” It is a highly curated, aspirational, photoshopped, filtered vignette.

Bonus!

26. Learn to be happy here, now, today. If you do not learn how to be happy in the present, no job, no partner, no success, no trip, no money, nothing that you are working for will be as enjoyable as you think. You cannot save up your happiness to be released when you think you deserve it. You either have it now, or you have it never.

While trust among Southeast Asian nations is improving, especially to counter threats from piracy and terrorism, China is acting to protect its own interests at the cost of others, according to U.S. Rear Admiral Don Gabrielson.

Gabrielson, commander of the Logistics Group Western Pacific, said nations should not seek to undermine the “existing system” through unilateral actions, without naming a particular country. He later said China, which has turned reclaimed reefs in the disputed South China Sea into military outposts, was proceeding with a “long-term plan” for the region.

“It’s important for everyone who has an interest in the region to do their part to understand that if the world does not come together to protect its own interests then China will do everything it can to protect what it sees as its interests at the cost of anyone else,” Gabrielson said on Monday at a briefing in Singapore.

“China is not worried about what anyone else values,” he said. “It is only worried about what China values, and from the United States perspective, that is a problem.”

“That is where the mutual respect really breaks down, and we’re very concerned about that,” Gabrielson added.

He was speaking on the sidelines of naval and coast guard exercises involving the U.S. and 11 nations including Myanmar, Singapore, the Philippines and Sri Lanka, focused on information sharing and training in counter-piracy and maritime security.

The drills come after the recent collision of the guided missile destroyer USS John S. McCain with a petroleum tanker near Singapore, which killed 10 U.S. sailors. The accident — the Navy’s fourth serious incident in the western Pacific this year — raised questions about whether the U.S. fleet has been stretched too thinly, forced to combine training with deployments over a vast area teeming with U.S. strategic interests.

Gabrielson did not comment on the McCain incident, instead focusing on the current exercises the U.S. is involved in, which run until Friday. He said while areas of friction also existed between Southeast Asian nations — on everything from territorial matters to food and natural resource security — trust was on the rise.

“Many of the nations are really doing a good job of understanding that we have to set some of these issues aside — as the Chinese would say, kick them into the tall grass — in order to deal with the issues at hand,” he said.

Undermine, Upset

“The United States encourages all nations to think very deeply about how we move into the future in those relationships because the existing system was built through a long and thoughtful series of negotiations,” Gabrielson said. “To undermine and upset that system should not be done on a bilateral or unilateral basis,” he said.

While the drills — known as SEACAT — are focused on information sharing that could help improve coordination over disputed territory, there are no plans currently to include North Asian nations, Gabrielson said. China claims the majority of the South China Sea, including areas contested by the likes of Vietnam, Malaysia and the Philippines.

The exercises involve ships being tracked, located, boarded and inspected at sea.

“There is an aspect of this that is like the old telephone game — I heard something and I tell you something and you tell your neighbor,” Gabrielson said. “So it’s a question of maintaining the quality and the clarity of the information that’s gathered. That’s an important skill, because there are humans involved.”

Alongside territorial disputes, the exercises come at a time of heightened concern about terrorism as the Islamic State is weakened in the Middle East and some fighters return to Southeast Asia.

“From the perspective of whether or not there is increasing risk of radicalism and terrorism and piracy, and human trafficking and narcotics trafficking, and illicit traffic of many forms, there is no question that risk is growing,” Gabrielson said. “I think that is well understood and widely acknowledged.”

We may look back on the summer of 2017 as a watershed moment for gender diversity: the lava of simmering issues erupts, and once out, flows to reshape the landscape.

However, what happened this summer to tech giants like Uber and Google is merely a symptom of a gradual change in a shifting landscape, that little-by-little has led to people taking notice of a personal blog from a female engineer, or reacting decisively to a discriminatory memo from a male engineer.

Today, the business value of diversity is clear. Studies have shown that businesses cannot be successful if they systematically exclude talent. There is no longer debate about the rationale for diversity in boardrooms, leadership or team composition. So why is solving this so difficult?

The issue is a complex one that, over the years, has resisted change. At the risk of over-simplifying, the challenge to get there has, until this recent eruption, been demarcated by both a lack of will and a lack of “know how” – the skills individuals and organizations need to garner greater inclusion across the board.

Emerging from this summer is more will for diversity than ever before. The diversity conversation is in the open with many positive signals of the desire to change. Among others, organizations who have been cultivating STEM talent like Girls Who Code, Anita Borg Institute and Girls Who Invest, are now being embraced by giants like Google.

My own firm, Insight Venture Partners, partnered with Computer Science New York City to mentor teenage women who are learning computer science.

Willingness to increase diversity is also visible in recruiting: many companies have policies and active plans to increase the pipeline of candidates and hire more females. Leaders recognize that by changing the gender composition of teams through outreach and hiring, the tenor of team dialogue will change.

This said, we can’t hire our way out of a lack of gender diversity. We need to focus on companies’ organizational impediments that lead to low retention – women enter the workforce in equal numbers as men, but for multiple reasons, don’t stay the course. Unless we push boundaries on skill-based organizational programs designed to retain women, we will not move the demographic dial.

As they climb out of the homogeneity crater, larger companies, as a first step, have implemented programs to build their skill muscles that include unconscious bias training, structured performance ratings and grievance systems. However, according to a recent Harvard Business Review analysis, the overall efficacy of HR-based diversity programs is unclear. They may reduce lawsuits, but they’re not increasing diversity.

To cultivate organizational skill, we must focus on inclusion efforts that serve as mechanisms to advance change in day-to-day company culture.

Rather than trying to outlaw bias, companies should engage managers to build teams that demonstrate parity. An organization is the sum of its teams and managers, those who make a difference. We know people don’t leave companies: they leave managers. If a woman’s direct manager is supportive, fair and open-minded, team members will take their cue from this behavior.

Companies should incentivize managers on standards of fairness and parity, engaging them directly in promoting a diverse and inclusive environment, and measuring their success

Secondly, companies should create positive male-female mentoring relationships: the diversity landscape will only reshape if more men get involved. These mentorships would potentially yield stronger results given men dominate leadership roles in tech and venture capital.

Male-female boss-employee relationships are fraught with potential to misconstrue behavior, creating a barrier for male and female co-workers to engage in social activities that foster trust. To paraphrase Kim Elsesser, professor at UCLA who focuses on psychology and gender, as a consequence of social (dis)comfort, men get to know other men much better and women get to know other women.

Since men lead most organizations, it’s easy to see how they’d choose the person they typically have a beer with for a business opportunity – a choice that, over time, can have major organizational repercussions in the composition of team leaders.

By creating an umbrella construct for these male/female relationships to develop, a simple budget and a list of suggested ways to interact, organizations can remove barriers women have in accessing power structures.

Thirdly, adjust the metrics. As the old adage goes, “What gets measured is what gets managed.” This is no different for diversity. It doesn’t mean quotas, but measurable goals. For example, the White House Diversity Initiative from 2016 resulted in nearly 80 companies signing up to measure progress against diversity goals. Progress against such a public pledge is a brand issue in the PR domain, and hence more powerful.

In the VC industry, metrics that will drive change include tracking the dollars invested in diverse management teams, number of deals sourced by minorities, and number of investment partners that are female or minorities. VCs should be cautious of only considering the number of closed deals for advancement.

Effective investing requires pattern recognition. A woman can demonstrate this skill whether or not she has taken time off for parenting. We should acknowledge the playing field is not even to start, and create measures that project diverse talent outcomes, knowing this yields greater alpha.

As we head into Fall 2017, the way forward after the eruption is becoming clear. I’m a strong believer that where there is a will, there is a way. This summer, industry will has gathered momentum – it’s a red-hot topic that leaders know they need to deal with. The path is starting to take shape, as organizations engage in deliberate skill-improvement activities to get us there.

The possibilities for business upside from greater inclusion is powerful, even greater than the negative forces that recently exploded. There is a new landscape, and while we don’t know what it looks like, we know it will be better, and necessarily different, than the current one.

Liliane Bettencourt, heiress to the L’Oreal cosmetics empire and the world’s wealthiest woman, has died. She was 94.

Her death was announced in a statement from Jean-Paul Agon, chief executive officer at L’Oreal Group. She died Wednesday at her home in Neuilly, a suburb west of Paris, according to a company spokesman. No cause was given.

Liliane Bettencourt

Photographer: Francois Durand/Getty Images

Bettencourt, the only child of L’Oreal SA founder Eugene Schueller, owned about one-third of the company’s shares. During her lifetime, the Paris-based company grew from a small hair-dye supplier into the largest maker of beauty products with more than 30 brands including Lancome and Garnier sold in about 140 countries. In 2016 the company reported revenue of 25.8 billion euros ($27 billion).

Her death will fuel speculation about Nestle SA’s 23 percent stake in L’Oreal, the second-largest holding after the Bettencourt family. The Swiss food company and the Bettencourt family have a shareholder agreement that limits either side from raising their respective stakes until six months after the death of Liliane Bettencourt, according to the company’s 2016 registration document. This restriction will now lift in March 2018.

L’Oreal in 2014 bought back 8 percent of its stock from the Swiss food company, which is free to sell the cosmetics company’s shares. Nestle’s website notes it will continue to act in concert with the Bettencourt family for the remaining duration of the shareholders’ agreement.

“Friendship, taste for life, knowledge, health. I would say that these are the things that are the most valuable,” Bettencourt said in a rare interview with French literary magazine L’Egoiste in 1988. “Everything that isn’t measured is what matters most.”

Francoise Bettencourt-Meyers

Photographer: Mehdi Fedouach/AFP via Getty Images

After the death of Bettencourt’s husband, French conservative politician Andre Bettencourt, in 2007, the media-shy heiress spent her final years embroiled in a legal spat with their only child, Francoise Bettencourt Meyers.

Assigned Guardians

Bettencourt Meyers claimed her mother was mentally unfit and had been manipulated by her entourage, especially one friend to whom she gave about 1 billion euros in gifts and cash. In 2011, a French judge assigned Bettencourt’s daughter and two grandsons as guardians over her interests.

Liliane Bettencourt’s fortune now passes onto Bettencourt Meyers, 64, who heads the family’s investment company. An academic, she wrote books on Greek mythology and Jewish-Christian relations. As main guardian of the family’s assets, including its stake in L’Oreal, Bettencourt Meyers succeeds her mother as the world’s richest woman.

Under French inheritance law — which dates from the Napoleonic era — Bettencourt Meyers, as the sole child, must receive at least 50 percent of her mother’s estate. She’s credited with the entire estate in Bloomberg’s analysis.

In the 1988 magazine interview, Bettencourt discussed the role that wealth may have played in her personal relationships.

Bettencourt with her husband Andre Bettencourt in Nov. 1973.

Photographer: Alain Dejean/Sygma via Getty Images

“Obviously, it’s surely more comfortable to be certain that you are loved for your soul,” she said. “But I didn’t have this concern.” She said when she sometimes wondered whether she was loved for her money, “I have smiled and said to myself, ‘If it’s more, so much the better.’”

Secret recordings of Bettencourt, made by a former butler, spawned separate inquiries into allegations of campaign finance violations related to former President Nicolas Sarkozy’s 2007 election. Bettencourt denied the reports. In 2013, French authorities dropped charges against Sarkozy.

Bettencourt also lost money in Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme.

‘Empty Pit’

Liliane Henriette Betsy Schueller was born Oct. 21, 1922, in Paris. She was 5 years old when her mother, Louise, died, leaving Liliane with with what she called “an empty pit nothing could ever fill.” She was raised by Dominican nuns.

Bettencourt described her childhood as dominated by a stern, workaholic father who woke up every day at 4 a.m. When she turned 15, she was sent to one of her father’s factories to glue labels on L’Oreal bottles.

While providing his daughter with France’s biggest fortune, Eugene Schueller had embarrassed her by his politics. Before and during the World War II, he was a staunch supporter of La Cagoule, a fascist group with ties to the Nazi regime.

During the 1930s Schueller hosted La Cagoule’s meetings at L’Oreal’s headquarters in Paris. Bettencourt’s daughter Francoise went on to marry the grandson of a rabbi who died in the Auschwitz concentration camp.

L’Oreal owes its origins — and its name — to Aureole, a nontoxic hair colorant Schueller developed in 1907 and sold to Parisian beauty salons. Two years later, the young chemist registered his business under the name Safe Hair Dye Company of France.

After her father’s death in 1957, Bettencourt entrusted L’Oreal to his best friend, Francois Dalle, who remained chief executive officer until 1984.

Lindsay Owen-Jones, who became CEO in 1988, turned the company into the global cosmetics giant it is today.

Bettencourt had two grandchildren. Her grandson, Jean-Victor Meyers, replaced her on L’Oreal’s board in 2012.

Francis says he visited psychoanalyst for six months to clarify a few things and that now nothing frightens him

Pope Francis has revealed that he sought the help of a psychoanalyst for six months when he was 42 and the leader of the Jesuit order in Argentina during the countrys military dictatorship.

The popes disclosure was made in a book based on 12 in-depth interviews with the French sociologist Dominique Wolton, to be published next week.

Francis said the weekly sessions with the psychoanalyst helped him a lot. For six months, I went to her home once a week to clarify a few things. She was a doctor and psychoanalyst. She was always there, he told Wolton for the 432-page book Pope Francis: Politics and Society.

Then one day, before she died, she called me. Not to receive the sacraments because she was Jewish but for a spiritual dialogue. She was a good person.

Francis told Wolton he now felt free. Of course, Im in a cage at the Vatican, but not spiritually. Nothing frightens me, he said.

The pope also took aim at priests who were rigid and afraid to communicate.

The disclosure came when Francis was discussing the role and influence of the courageous women in his life, including his mother, his two grandmothers and Esther Ballestrino de Careaga, the communist founder of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo movement in Buenos Aires, who was killed during the dictatorship.

He also spoke of childhood sweethearts and adolescent girlfriends, saying his relationships with women had enriched his life. I thank God for having known these true women in my life, the pope told Wolton. [Women see things differently from men] and it is important to listen to both.

The Jesuit tradition is known to value psychoanalysis, with many regarding self-awareness and introspection as being complementary to spirituality.

Robert Mickens, the Rome-based editor of the English-language edition of Catholic daily newspaper La Croix, said Francis had previously acknowledged that social sciences could benefit human development.

There has been a gradual shift in attitudes within the Catholic church towards psychotherapy since the 1970s, Mickens said. Its very common in priest formation programmes, especially in the western world, for them to undergo a psychological evaluation before admission to a seminary or diocese. Theres a recognition that social sciences can help unearth issues that need to be dealt with.

The popes eye-popping disclosures could challenge the perception among some people that those who sought treatment were weak, he said.

In 2008, the Vatican issued guidelines on the use of psychology in the training of priests. In some cases, recourse to experts in the psychological sciences can be useful, the paper said.

Among candidates for the priesthood can be found some who come from particular experiences human, family, professional, intellectual or affective which, in various ways, have left psychological wounds that are not yet healed and that cause disturbances, the guidelines said.

These wounds, unknown to the candidate in their real effects, are often erroneously attributed by him to causes outside himself, thus depriving him of the possibility of facing them adequately.

At the time of his sessions in 1978 or 1979, tensions over the leadership of Jorge Bergoglio, as Pope Francis was then known, were high among Argentinas Jesuits.

He had earlier been accused of effectively delivering two fellow priests to the military authorities in 1976, when he refused to publicly endorse their controversial social work in the slums of Buenos Aires.

Argentinas dirty war was over by the time of Bergoglios psychotherapy, but the military dictatorship was still in place.

However, there was continuing controversy over his divisive leadership. During his six years as provincial superior from 1973 to 1979, he upset some people with his determination to impose a fresh direction and purpose.

Its hard to know exactly what took him to seek psychotherapy perhaps issues which had come to the fore as leader of the Jesuits, said Austen Ivereigh, the author of The Great Reformer: Francis and the Making of a Radical Pope.

It was certainly a tense time both nationally and internationally [for Jesuits], adding to what had been a difficult, although very successful, period for Bergoglio. He had gallstones soon after, which suggests a level of stress.

But maybe he just wanted to take the time to take stock. Jesuits are not afraid of seeking professional help when they need it and see psychotherapy as complementary to spirituality. I think this revelation only adds to our already very human picture of a remarkable man.

There are more psychologists per capita in Argentina than any other country in the world, according to researcher Modesto Alonso. In 2011, there were 196 psychologists for every 100,000 people compared with about 27 per 100,000 in the US.

In his conversations with Wolton, Francis said European countries exploited Africa in the colonial era, and although Europe had important Christian roots they are not the only ones. There are others that cannot be denied.

Abortion, he said, was a grave sin, its the murder of an innocent. And while he insisted marriage was between a man and a woman, saying we cannot change it, this is the nature of things, the pope acknowledged the existence of same-sex civil unions.

Woltons book is published next Wednesday as Francis begins a six-day visit to Colombia, the first visit by a pope in more than 30 years. The South American country is bitterly divided over a peace deal ending a 50-year war between the government and rebel guerrilla forces, Farc, which has claimed an estimated 220,000 lives and displaced millions.

Yeah, she seemed really nice about it, but what will she be saying behind my back? She must think I’m a loser.

My mind wandered. And when I say wandered, I mean really wandered. Like, past the confines of typical, logical thought. That was pretty much how my mind functioned, especially when it came to human interaction. I’m what you might wanna call a weirdo, or a socially-handicapped woman when it comes to relationships, especially with other women. I was the girl in high school who had a lot of guy friends, and worse, that awkward junior high kid who played with frogs and Barbies while their peers moved on to boys and blue eye shadow. I really held onto the Barbie dream house for far too long. Actually wish I had kept that thing. But I digress.

Point is, I didn’t grow out of a lot of my awkwardness. I just carried it onward to adulthood. I was the lady sitting beside the group of cool moms at the ballgame trying to think of something clever to add to the conversation.

Maybe just be really nice, Brie. That should work.

“Hi. How are you today?” I ask cheerfully to the nearest mom.

A very pregnant her replies, “I’m so hot. I’m ready to have this baby already!”

“Me too!!” I reply too eagerly, a huge grin plastered across my face.

You’re not pregnant, moron! I chastise myself, but quickly go over how to save the conversation in my head. Yes that sounds good, Brie.

Recently there was a misunderstanding between a co-worker and I. Immediately I went into panic mode. Aside from being socially inept I also hate confrontation. Loathe it, in fact. My husband is so lucky. Typically if I’m in an altercation or disagreement I will go into a mental shutdown. I never have the cool comeback when someone is a jerk. I mean, I think it. Later. After they’ve already left my sight.

Oh yeah, well at least I have enough confidence in myself to not try and make others look stupid so I feel better about me!

Yeah, that’s so true. That’s what I should have said. Next time that’s what I’ll say.

But aside from never getting my point across adequately I also have a tendency (make that a huge tendency) to create more of the situation than is required. Like, in a situation the person who hurts me will have probably already long forgotten our conversation. They’ve moved on, and I have too. I moved on to the part where I dwell on it for anywhere from 8-36 hours, roughly.

Like an amusement park of emotions

I’ll replay the entire scenario. I’ll do a slo-mo play-by-play in my head. What did I do wrong, what could I have done better, and will this person now hate me forever? Will they tell all their friends to hate me?

I have gotten better at this over the years, actually. At forty I’ve reached a place where I don’t care much what people think. Unless it’s hurting my witness as a Christian it doesn’t matter much to me. But that anxious, overthinker? She’s still in there somewhere too. She’s comes out every now and again.

And such was the case with my most recent misunderstanding with a coworker. I reached out almost immediately to explain the situation, apologize, and try to smooth things over. It only took her about five minutes to respond. Naturally those were the longest five minutes known to man. In that tiny block of time, I imagined what she must be thinking about me! I imagined extended scenarios. You think I’m a writer?! You should see the stuff in my head that never comes out. It’s a cross between William Shakespeare and reality television on TLC.

After my friend responded back quickly and kindly with understanding, I felt a sweet surge of relief. Until the anxious, overthinker tried to kick in.

Does she really mean, “no worries?”

She’s probably telling our other coworkers how stupid I am right this minute!

In my moments of accelerated ridiculousness of inner dialogue I have to talk myself off the ledge. I have to remind myself what I’ve learned about my character as it’s been molded by Christ. I have to remember I’m a daughter of the King. So if my crown gets a little crooked, I just have to readjust it. And my thought processes. I’m kind of a major work in progress. Sometimes I think if I could look around in there with a flashlight I’d see a “Men at Work” construction sign. Or rather a “The Son of Man at Work” sign.

I would like to think I’m not the anxious, overthinker I used to be. But I also know I’m not the non-anxious, level-headed thinker I need to be. I know God made me think about the world the way I do for a reason, and as I find my balance between empathy and being overly consumed by emotions, I will hopefully learn how to best relate to all of God’s people. That’s what I’m going with anyway.

There’s no shortage of startups building their brands around AI for enterprise. And within the enterprise, few spaces are as competitive as AI-powered voice analytics. TalkIQ is the latest company in the space to carry home a large round of financing with promise. With $14 million in Series A funding, the TalkIQ team is hoping its proprietary tech stack and engineering-heavy team will give it a meaningful advantage selling to sales teams.

TalkIQ is bringing automatic speech recognition and natural language processing to previously unsearchable sales calls. With a focus on voice communication, the company provides near real-time insights into conversations as they happen. The platform can transcribe and flag key events in a conversation while retrieving battle cards on competitors when they get mentioned. TalkIQ also captures higher-level analytics that managers can use to get a view of what is working (or not) for sales teams.

Though TalkIQ wouldn’t get into too much detail about the role Salesforce will be playing in its go to market, it did admit that the company is a major customer expected to drive sales via deeper integrations in the future. Gven the shared customer profile between Salesforce and TalkIQ, the friendship makes a lot of logical sense.

And as far as I’m concerned it’s going to matter…or at least it’s going to have to matter. VoiceOps, Choras.ai, Deepgram, Gong and others have had products in this space for some time now. But in the enterprise space, everything comes down sales relationships — so winning the affection of Salesforce may prove meaningful for TalkIQ.

Dan O’Connell, CEO of TalkIQ, remains confident that the accuracy and near real-time capabilities of his platform will set it apart in the long run. He says that performance starts with rejecting off the shelf solutions to machine learning problems and taking things in-house for more control. With a $7 million seed round and three and a half years of runway, TalkIQ has certainly had luxuries unavailable to others.

I woke up on the morning of my twenty-third birthday to a dead-end job, a failing relationship, an empty wallet and a complete lack of direction. And I’m sure I’m not alone in that fate.

The years following college aren’t kind to us. We are thrust into the real world with a large amount of student debt, jobs that barely pay enough to make rent, relationships that are rapidly changing and a profound feeling of being lost on how to handle it all. Nobody likes you when you’re twenty-three, including your own life.

And yet, we pull through.

Most of us make it to our twenty-fourth year. Most of us make it out of the woods. Most of us are lucky enough to say that by the end of our twenty-third year we’re no longer feeling completely and utterly lost. But in case you’re not there yet, here are a few things you may need to be reminded of right now.

1. You’re not going to be lonely for the rest of your life.

Twenty-three is a lonely and uncomfortable age. College is (probably) over. Your professional life is (hopefully) just beginning. And your social life is doing an awkward, uncomfortable shuffle in response to all the changes. You’re far away from the people who know you well and not yet emotionally close with the people who physically surround you.

Give it time. Give your relationships the chance to evolve. Give yourself the chance to adjust to no longer living with a group of your closest friends (yes, you will adjust). Loneliness doesn’t last forever, even when it feels like it will.

2. You don’t need to be working your dream job right now.

It’s okay to take a shitty office job because you need to pay the bills. It’s okay to spend your spare time volunteering to get the experience you need. There are a thousand different routes you can take to get to where you want to go. Don’t beat yourself up in the process – just keep moving, steadily and slowly, toward wherever you would rather be.

3. Everyone feels lost at some point.

No, seriously. Every single person you meet, interact with or think about in the course of a day has almost definitely had a period of their lives where they had NO clue what they were doing. So this is yours. You’re just getting it out of the way early.

4. You still have so much time to fail.

You have time to fail at love. At your career. At your creative aspirations. At your personal goals.

You are still young enough to fall and pick yourself back up, so many more times. So don’t be afraid to take those big, scary risks now – while you still have the time and the strength and the determination to start over.

5. Someone is going to love you again.

You’re going to feel that insane over-the-moon feeling again. You’re going to want to tell someone ‘I love you’ again. You’re going to have something real with another human being again, even if it doesn’t feel like it right now. The ability to love other people doesn’t leave you, even if it’s a muscle you haven’t flexed in a long while.

6. You are going to love you again.

Your self-perception is going to adjust to encompass the new, adult you: the one that you are still growing into. Don’t beat yourself up about who you are or are not yet at twenty-three – you have so much time left to grow into the person you’ll become, and to be damn proud of whoever that will be.

7. You are allowed to set and keep boundaries.

Being a young adult means saying ‘Yes’ to a lot of things – long work hours, demands from our partners – because you aren’t yet sure what you’re allowed to say no to. But here’s the deal – you are allowed to set whatever personal or professional boundaries you need to set in order to stay healthy and stable.

You don’t have to earn the right to take care of yourself. You deserve it, as a basic product of your existence.

8. You are never entirely without support.

You may not be lucky enough to have parents who are able to give you financial support or even friends who are immediately available to give you emotional support, but rest assured, if things ever went really wrong, you’d have people there to help you out in ways you may not expect. If at least a few names come to mind, you’re doing better than a lot of people.

9. Being disappointed in yourself just means that you know you can do better.

If you were never falling short of your own goals, you’d be living your life all wrong. Disappointment – in moderation – means that you believe in bigger things for yourself. And holding that belief in life will take you further than you could possibly imagine.

10. It’s not your job to live someone else’s dream.

You don’t have to move to Asia to teach English if it’s not going to make you happy. You don’t have to move to a big city and get a mind-numbing office job because it’s going to impress your parents. The choices you make now set the tone for the choices you’re going to make the rest of your life. So you’re allowed to make the choices you want to make – and only worry about impressing your future self.

11. ‘No’ is a very important word.

You’re allowed to use it. Say no to jobs that don’t entice you. Say no to people who bring out the worst in you. Say no to all the opportunities that prevent you from pursuing the bigger, braver, bolder life course that you’d rather be on. Say no confidently, strategically and as regularly as you need to. It is your right and in some cases, your greatest asset.

12. Nobody can read your mind – you’re going to have to ask for what you want.

Nobody is going to come hand you your dream job or your perfect relationship or your ideal lifestyle because you’ve been obeying the rules so diligently. You have to ask – directly and sometimes incessantly – for those things. It’s unfortunate that the adult world works this way, but it does. The sooner you get comfortable asking for things, the sooner you start getting big results. Results other people don’t get because they’re too afraid to ask for them.

13. You don’t have to be embarrassed.

Not by the job you’re working or the person you’re dating or where you are in life, in relation to the people you graduated college with. Embarrassment is a choice. And the prouder you choose to be of yourself – no matter where you are in life – the further you’re going to go. Confidence is a major predictor of success.

14. Your body is not seventeen anymore.

You can’t exist on a steady diet of beer, burritos and power-naps forever. Your body is starting to change and you have to change to accommodate it if you don’t want to feel just a little bit worn-out for the rest of eternity. Treating your body properly is going to have more of a positive impact on your life in the coming years than you could possibly imagine right now.

15. You’re probably hotter than you think you are.

Something I hear over and over again from middle-aged people is that they can’t believe they ever thought they were unattractive in their early twenties.

We are our own harshest critics at this point in our lives and it’s more likely than not that your most unattractive quality is the lack of confidence you have in your own appearance. Start believing in yourself a little more right now, so you have to kick yourself a little less aggressively later.

16. You aren’t done changing yet, and you probably won’t be for a while.

There are those rare, beautiful moments in our early twenties where it feels like we’ve got it all figured out and we’re entirely out of the woods. But those moments never last for too long. Life is constantly changing – but that’s far from being a bad thing. Your brain is still developing. You are still developing. And the worst thing you can be right now is stagnant.

17. You have to give yourself a break.

At 23, it’s easy to get so caught up in the working and progressing and forming relationships and finding ourselves that we forget to ever take a moment to just breath. To relax. And to take a brief break from frantically dashing toward the future. You still deserve to live and enjoy your life. Your future will come soon enough.

18. Losing friends is a natural consequence of this stage of your life.

Losing touch with your old college roommates or your hometown friends or the loved ones who settled down earlier or later than you did is a natural consequence of growing older. It isn’t solely up to you to keep every friendship you’ve ever had alive – some things fade out naturally, because they should. Because some of the friendships you shared were meant to last a season, not a lifetime, and that’s okay.

19. There will be people you have to leave behind as you grow, and that doesn’t make you a bad person.

Everyone grows up and grows into themselves at different paces. And the older you get, the more you will notice that some people almost deliberately choose to stay stuck or hold themselves back. And it is not your job to rescue these people from themselves. You can love them, you can support them and you can encourage them but at the end of the day you just can’t hold yourself back on their behalf. They have responsibility over their lives and you have responsibility over yours. You are not selfish or horrible to keep moving forward without them.

20. Comparisons are completely senseless, unless you use them as a motivator.

Comparisons are a great thing if you’re using them to motivate yourself to rise up to someone else’s level of greatness. If, however, you’re only using them to beat yourself down, they are the single greatest waste of your time and energy. You are not your friend or your college classmate or your co-worker who just got a raise. You are you. And if you want to rise above the rest, you have to use the skills that are unique to you, rather than pining after what comes naturally to everyone else.

21. Everyone fucks up.

No, seriously. Everyone has made at least one big, huge mistake that they wish they could take back. It’s just that we tend to not talk about our fuck-ups, which creates a culture where everyone believes that they’re the only ones who ever encounters them. Trust me: you’re not alone. We’ve all done some royally screwed-up stuff. And we’ve all survived it. Which means that you’re probably going to as well.

22. Everyone’s terrified.

Nobody really knows what’s coming next. Nobody actually has a foolproof plan. Nobody is 100% sure of how to get where they want in life and nobody has it all figured out.

Even the most confident people are a little bit unsure and a little bit terrified sometimes. Life’s just like that. Uncertainty is a key ingredient to the whole shebang.

23. If you had it all figured out right now, the rest of your life would be boring.

If you had the rest of your life locked and loaded at twenty-three years old, the rest of your life would be a let-down. The ups and downs are just a natural part of what keeps things interesting. And the truth is, now is the best time imaginable to ride out those fluctuations. A period of struggle prepares you for a future of resilience. So struggle away at twenty-three. The future has plenty of time to fall into place.

Heidi Priebe explains how to manage the ups, downs and inside-outs of everyday life as an ENFP in her new book available here.

“The professional fire brigade was called to the hospital in Worms,” a translated version of the Facebook post reads. “One person had a very sensitive body part in the hole of a 2.5 kg dumbbell disc.”

That’s right, a desperate man decided to put his penis inside a cold barbell, and had a little trouble removing it on his own.

The firefighters spent THREE HOURS trying to remove the dick from the disc, using a cutting grinder, a vibrating saw, and what they called “a hydraulic rescue device.” We’re not exactly sure what that is, but there is no way that was comfortable for this poor man.

While this dude clearly made a terrible mistake we can bet he will never make again, please take this as a lesson and remember there are plenty of safe male sex toys out there for purchase. Never use a piece of metal.